Craig Wright, the Australian computer programmer who claims to be the creator of bitcoin, is reacting harshly to the plagiarism charges that have been brought against him. He even went so far as to define the attack on him as "criminal fraud". But a new report accuses him of doing exactly this crime.
Paintedfrog's investigation into Wright's autographed documents
Wright completed his BA in international commercial law for Northumbria University in 2008. In a Medium article published Thursday, April 9, the pseudonym author "Paintedfrog" claims that this thesis is chock full of the work of other people to whom Wright does not gave credits.
The 90-page thesis, entitled The Impact of Internet Intermediary Liability, is publicly available on the SSRN online academic database. "The work is heavily plagiarized," wrote Paintedfrog. "Much of the text is taken, both in paraphrase and in literal form, from other works that have not been granted credits."
Specifically, Paintedfrog states that Wright copied heavily from Hilary E. Pearson's Internet Service Provider, written in 1996. Of the 58 paragraphs in Pearson's document, “Wright copied 45; 25 in full and 20 largely, ”said Paintedfrog.
He claims that Wright also took and reworded one section of another of Pearson's documents, Intellectual Property and the Internet: a comparison between the United Kingdom and US Law (1998), always without citation.
Wright's thesis also cites Ronald Mann and Seth Belzley's The Promise of Internet Intermediary Liability (2005) as one of his sources. However, as Paintedfrog illustrates, large portions of the document's footnotes can be found in Wright's 2008 thesis document, copied word for word. Wright also used the text of some Wikipedia articles without citing the source or crediting the contributor.
Quick solution
After Paintedfrog's article spread on social media, it seems that Wright had access to his thesis to make some changes. SSRN shows that the document was modified on April 10 (previously it had remained intact for three years, since the original upload.) The latest version includes a credit to Pearson in the introduction. Right has several educational qualifications, including a doctorate in computer science, a doctorate in theology and a master's degree in statistics. It has a total of 36 articles uploaded to SSRN.
This is not the first time he has been accused of taking other people's works without crediting them for the job.In July 2017, Wright published The Fallacy of Selfish Mining: A Mathematical Critique to demonstrate that the proposed changes to Bitcoin could make the protocol less sure.
The paper is presumably based on a game theory theorem proposed in 2003 by Wen Liu and Jinting Wang. The problem is that Wright never mentioned them, and apparently used literally much of their work. Since May 2016, Wright has started to claim to be the sole creator of Bitcoin. However, he has not yet been able to prove it.
And what do you think of it? How do you trade the Bitcoins that Wright would have created? Have you looked at automatic trading with Bitcoin Pro? Let us know in the comments below.
